It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neoconservative policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the state of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current issue of American Conservative, believes this ardently, while the most quoted advocates of neocon militancy, Richard Perle and David Frum, go further than merely to deny that neoconservatism is an Israel First worldview. They insist that criticism of neocon policies is, at heart, anti-Semitic.
Richard Perle, co-author with Frum of "The End of Evil," old acquaintances remember as being for many years on the public scene as an adamant opponent of Soviet wiles and analyst of the perils of complacent coexistence. Perle's specialty was national defense, and he was there year after year to point out, for instance, that the disarmament fetishists played into the hands of Soviet opportunists. If we unilaterally stopped testing nuclear weapons, we risked Soviet technical advantage. If we stopped deploying theater weapons in Europe, we were threatened by the Soviets' development of their SS-20 missiles and the corresponding advantages in leverage over Western Europe.
It is reasonable to say that Perle's focus on the communist threat was central to his devising of corollary policies. It is charged now, by e.g. Buchanan, that that focus is now on Israel -- that Perle and co-author David Frum rise in the morning with a map of Israel in front of them and decide what ideas, people, countries to encourage, which to discourage, based on their bearing on Israel.
Now these acts of analytical reductionism are in part owing to political realities. Pat Buchanan, who has an ear for the trenchant way of saying things, wrote 10 years ago that Congress had become the "Amen corner" for pro-Israel policies. In this space, I once jocularly proposed that Israel be annexed as the 51st state, which would give us the advantage of participating in the formulation of Israeli policies, which we would then automatically endorse.
Nobody who knows his way around questions the political leverage of the Jewish vote in critical states or denies the importance of Jewish patronage of favored candidates and officeholders. But the transposition of this into the position that U.S. policies are formulated because they bear directly on Israeli interests is invention. The proposal to go to war against Iraq was, concertedly, advocated in one form or another by Richard Perle. But that policy proceeded from the loins of Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and was animated by the reiterated U.S. interest in the stability of the Near East.